Villains sneering at heroes over their supposed similarity is the stuff supercuts are made of, a cliche hoary even by the shopworn standards of superhero stories. Yet despite its reliance on this device, and on more grimdark violence than we’ve yet seen in an already pretty brutal show, “Condemned” didn’t make me want to throw my laptop through multiple floors in disgust.

Why? The answer lies in the conversation this episode is having with its genre. Daredevil spends much of the hour trapped in a vacant building with Vladimir, the vicious Russian mob boss who until recently had been his number one target — and who, indeed, he’d beaten the living shit out of not even an hour before. Daredevil dragged him to safety and saved his life for several reasons. First, the crooked cops who are trying to kill him on Wilson Fisk’s orders are after DD as well. Second, the vigilante needs the gangster to live long enough to cough up details about his mysterious puppetmaster. Third — and this is the key part — that tough-guy line he laid down about how it’s not okay to kill but it’s perfectly fine to let people die? It’s bullshit.

The thing is, it’s not just bullshit in Matt Murdock’s book, whatever bluster he throws at Vladimir to bluff him into talking. It’s bullshit all the time, in every superheroic circumstance. Yet that didn’t stop Christopher Nolan from making it the climactic moral argument of Batman Begins, the initial entry in his genre-redefining Dark Knight trilogy of Bat-blockbusters. Remember? Batman and Ra’s al Ghul are trapped in a subway plummeting to the ground, and the Dark Knight kinda wisecracks “I won’t kill you…but I don’t have to save you.” Yeah you do, you cape-wearing murderer! It’s not okay for anyone to let a person who’s completely in their power die to punish them for perceived transgressions, let alone if that person is dressing up in costume to serve as an ethical exemplar for their community. Daredevil is no one’s idea of an ideal hero — he has way too much fun taking a road flare to Vladimir’s wounds for that…

…but he senses, correctly, that selectively blowing off his responsibility to save lives is, ahem, not so different than taking them directly. (Stick that in your Batsignal and light it, Bruce.) This novel, moral answer to the whole corny “what really separates a hero from a villain” question made it worth asking in the first place. I wouldn’t be surprised if it helps Daredevil supplant the Dark Knight as the street-level super-ethicist of choice.

An even cleverer attempt to peel these sticky layers apart comes when Matt and Wilson finally meet, over walkie-talkies anyway. (In this age of IMs and gchats, actually calling your archenemy is practically like proposing to him.) It’s an electric moment, of course: when Fisk’s characteristically passive-aggressively polite “I’d like to speak to the man in the mask, please” crackles through the airwaves, I literally yelled “Whoa!” out loud. After that, though, it’s an anticlimactic conversation in which the Kingpin delivers a lot of “this is our last conversation” tough talk we know is overconfident by half, even if DD himself doesn’t.

So much for those rollover minutes.

But there’s one part of their call that’s damn near genius, and it’s the part that cuts closest to the heart of the “we’re not so different” trope. “Say your name,” Daredevil demands of his antagonist — a power play he makes because he knows Fisk forbids it, increasing his Voldemort-like air of evil omnipotence. Without missing a beat, Fisk replies “You first”—then, after Murdock stays mum, he scoffs “That’s what I thought.” That’s when it hit me, right at the same time it hit Matt: Daredevil really is using his anonymity for the exact same purpose as the Kingpin: to strike terror into the hearts of the superstitious, cowardly lot known as criminals. (My apologies, Bruce.)

After that, Fisk can draw all the false equivalencies about their motives and methods he wants — this one, core comparison remains both accurate and impossible to shake.

“Condemned” sheds light on some of the unspoken ugliness inherent in all superheroes. They’re vigilantes who assign themselves the power to judge guilt and innocence in matters of life and death, from behind masks and powers that make them largely impervious to judgement themselves. In that light, it’s easy to believe that a terrified city could buy the bogus story Fisk puts out to the media, laying the blame for the bombings that took out the Russian mob at Daredevil’s door, with security-camera footage of one of his regularly scheduled roundelay’s with New York’s finest as proof. (BTW, you wanna talk about pop-culture politics? Daredevil has yet to present the police as anything but a well-armed gang of murderers. Imaginethat!) What’s to stop a so-called superhero from taking things this far?

We know that Daredevil will survive this frame-up and live to fight another day — we knew it even before the news broke that he’d helped make the streets safe for Netflix’s record stock prices. There’s no Vladimir-style last-stand blaze of glory, complete with elegiac ‘80s sci-fi synths playing him out, in Matt Murdock’s future. But the way “Condemned” dove into aspects of his line of work most super-stuff steers well clear of that makes the danger real. He’ll be fighting his war for a long time. But do we want him to?